RRND Email Full Text (Scheduled)

  • Spain: Ortiz resigns following Supreme Court conviction

    Source: Politico

    “Spanish Attorney General Álvaro García Ortiz resigned Monday, stepping down before a judicial ruling banning him from holding public office for two years went into effect. Spain’s Supreme Court last week convicted García Ortiz of leaking details of a tax probe involving the partner of Madrid’s regional leader Isabel Díaz Ayuso, a rising star among the country’s conservative voters. The outgoing attorney general denies leaking the information, and several journalists who published articles about the probe testified he was not their source. Although the court announced García Ortiz’s guilty verdict within days of his trial’s conclusion, the panel of judges who tried him has yet to publish the legal reasoning behind the ruling.” (11/24/25)

    https://www.politico.eu/article/spain-attorney-general-resigns-following-supreme-court-conviction-alvaro-garcia-ortiz/

  • Australia: Senator condemned for burka stunt in parliament

    Source: BBC News [UK state media]

    “An Australian senator has provoked anger for wearing a burka in parliament, after pushing for a ban on the Muslim garment. Pauline Hanson was condemned by fellow senators, with one accusing her of “blatant racism”. Proceedings in the senate were halted as she refused to remove the item. The Queensland senator, of the anti-immigration One Nation party, was seeking to introduce a bill that would ban full face coverings in public – a policy she has long campaigned for. It is the second time she has worn the garment – which covers the face and body – in parliament, and said her actions were in protest at the senate rejecting her bill.” (11/24/25)

    https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cz94pdkzqvwo

  • Jamil Abdullah al-Amin, 1943-2025

    Source: New York Times

    “Jamil Abdullah Al-Amin, who as H. Rap Brown defined [b]lack militancy in the 1960s with a call to arms against white oppression, and who later lived quietly as a Muslim cleric and shopkeeper until his arrest in 2000 in the murder of a sheriff’s deputy, died on Sunday in a federal prison hospital in North Carolina. He was 82. … Before converting to Islam and changing his name in the 1970s, Mr. Al-Amin was one of the most incendiary orators among the Black Power activists who emerged in the late 1960s to challenge the leadership and nonviolent strategy of the civil rights movement.” (11/23/25)

    https://archive.is/BHeBU

  • FL: Fishback enters gubernatorial race, challenging Trump’s pick

    Source: CNN

    ‘Another GOP contender has launched a bid to succeed Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis, teeing up a broader challenge to President Donald Trump’s chosen candidate to lead his adopted home state. James Fishback, a 30-year-old investor who lives in Florida’s rural Panhandle region, formally announced his candidacy Monday, immediately taking shots at Republican Rep. Byron Donalds, who has Trump’s endorsement and the inside track on the race to replace DeSantis, who can’t run again in 2026. … Following the governor’s footsteps, Fishback has pledged to eliminate property taxes and is taking aim at H-1B visas, which are meant to allow American companies to bring in people with technical skills that are hard to find in the United States.” (11/24/25)

    https://www.cnn.com/2025/11/24/politics/gop-florida-governor-race


  • Inflation is Class Warfare Against the Poor

    Source: Libertarian Institute
    by Thomas Eddlem

    “[I]nflation is the most effective instrument in making the rich richer, and the poor poorer. But what would happen in an alternative scenario where the money supply doesn’t increase much over a long period of time? As it happens, we have a historical case of this happening in nineteenth century America.” (11/24/25)

    https://libertarianinstitute.org/articles/inflation-is-class-warfare-against-the-poor

  • Trump’s Plan to Give Americans $2,000 Tariff Dividend Checks Is “Pure Fiscal Fantasy”

    Source: Cato Institute
    by Colin Grabow & Clark Packard

    “This is not a dividend at all. It’s a deficit-financed giveaway, arriving at a moment when the federal government is already projected to run a $1.8 trillion deficit. Worse still, the money is already spoken for. Congress counted tariff revenue as an offset when passing the president’s One Big Beautiful Bill tax reform package earlier this year. Revenue cannot fund both tax cuts and rebate checks. The administration is trying to spend the same dollar twice. But suppose, for the sake of argument, the money actually existed and the deficit didn’t matter. The proposal would still be misguided. For one thing, it’s economically pointless. Tariffs are taxes paid by Americans, not foreigners, and the government’s plan amounts to collecting that money in Washington, skimming off administrative costs, and then mailing a smaller amount back to the public.” (11/24/25)

    https://www.cato.org/commentary/trumps-plan-give-americans-2000-tariff-dividend-checks-pure-fiscal-fantasy

  • Don’t Call This a “Peace Plan”

    Source: Foreign Policy
    by Christian Caryl

    “Today’s Ukraine is not 1938 Czechoslovakia. Yet the 28-point ‘peace plan’ negotiated between the United States and Russia and leaked to the media late last week suggests that U.S. President Donald Trump considers the Munich deal a precedent. Like Chamberlain, he seems to believe that he can make a deal with Russian President Vladimir Putin about Ukraine’s land and future over the latter’s head. But this calculation is flawed. It betrays Trump’s fundamental misunderstanding of European geopolitics — both Russia’s unbroken designs to control Ukraine and the Ukrainians’ continued willingness to fight for their land and independence.” (11/24/25)

    https://archive.is/Jdecc

  • Thanks to the Supreme Court, presidential immunity is now a license to kill

    Source: The Hill
    by Steven Lubet

    “President Trump often portrays himself as a mythical, hyper-masculine character. On his digital trading cards, for example, he is depicted as an astronaut, a cowboy, a race-driver, a boxer and of course, a costumed superhero. Although he hasn’t yet appeared as a secret agent, Trump does have one thing in common with the fictional James Bond: They have both been licensed to kill. … In Trump’s case, the authorization is all too real, backed up by exponentially more firepower than Bond’s tricked-out Aston Martin. Enabled by a Supreme Court decision granting presidents immunity for official acts, Trump has deployed planes, missiles and drones to sink 21 small, unarmed boats suspected of drug smuggling in international waters in the Caribbean and Eastern Pacific. As of last week, at least 83 crew members or passengers had been killed. Neither the evidence nor the purported legal basis for the strikes has been made public.” (11/24/25)

    https://thehill.com/opinion/judiciary/supreme-court/5617710-supreme-court-trump-immunity/

  • Jack Mallers vs. Chase: Why Debanking is a Badge of Honor

    Source: Karl Dickey’s Freedom Vanguard
    by Karl Dickey

    “Do you know Jack Mallers? Have you heard of the company Strike that he runs? Perhaps you’ve heard of JP Morgan Chase? Well, let me tell a quick story of how the world is a-changin’. Yesterday, on X, Mallers posted the September 2, 2025, letter he framed from Chase, noting the closure of all his accounts. … The letter informed Mallers that Chase had flagged ‘concerning activity’ during routine monitoring. The result? His accounts were being closed immediately, and he was permanently barred from opening new ones. No specifics were offered. No recourse was suggested. He was simply ejected from the financial system by one of its most powerful gatekeepers. Of note, Strike is somewhat of a competitor to JP Morgan Chase, and if not a direct threat today, certainly is for the future. For many, this would be a crisis. For Mallers, it was a milestone.” (11/24/25)

    https://palmbeachexaminer.substack.com/p/jack-mallers-vs-chase-why-debanking

  • Grocery Bills and Corporate Taxes Dominate Upset Bid in Tennessee

    Source: The American Prospect
    by David Dayen

    “In Tennessee, another test of the ongoing fragmentation of the Trump coalition is playing out in a December 2 special election for the U.S. House. After bad losses for Republicans across the country over the last month, a seat that Donald Trump won last year by 22 points is at enough risk that conservative groups have thrown $3.3 million at the race in the final stretch. The seat was vacated in July by Rep. Mark Green, who opted to take a private-sector job. Republican Mark Van Epps, a member of Gov. Bill Lee’s administration, is facing Democratic state Rep. Aftyn Behn. It was designed as a gerrymandered red seat …. But the possibility of a monumental upset has brought DNC chair Ken Martin and 2024 presidential nominee Kamala Harris to the district, earned Behn cable news appearances, and raised a ton of anticipation.” [editor’s note: This is my district. I am choosing neither the Trumper nor the Mamdani in a dress – SAT] (11/24/25)

    https://prospect.org/2025/11/24/tennessee-aftyn-behn-congress-house-race-nashville/

  • The case for treating adults as adults when it comes to AI chatbots

    Source: Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression
    by John Coleman

    “Recent news reports describe a wave of lawsuits alleging that OpenAI’s generative AI chatbot, ChatGPT, caused adult users psychological distress. The filings reportedly seek monetary damages for people who conversed at length with a chatbot’s simulated persona and reported experiencing delusions and emotional trauma. In one reported case, a man became convinced that ChatGPT was sentient and later took his own life. These situations are tragic and call for genuine compassion. Unfortunately, if these lawsuits succeed, they’ll effectively impose an unworkable expectation on anyone creating a chatbot to scrub anything that could trigger its most vulnerable users. Everyone, even fully capable adults, would be effectively treated as if they are on suicide watch. That’s a standard that would chill open discourse.” (11/24/25)

    https://www.thefire.org/news/case-treating-adults-adults-when-it-comes-ai-chatbots

  • A Henry Ford for Housing

    Source: Law & Liberty
    by Nathan Smith

    “To house people more affordably, we need to make homebuilding more efficient. But a deeply entrenched overregulation of land use and the building trades keeps homebuilding firms small and backward. Other industries — aviation, computing, agriculture, containerized shipping, manufacturing, retail, telecommunications, and so on — have raised productivity through deregulation, big business, innovation, automation, standardization, and scalability. Homebuilding needs to follow suit.” (11/24/25)

    https://lawliberty.org/a-henry-ford-for-housing/

  • Extracting minerals in Africa – for Africa

    Source: Christian Science Monitor
    by staff

    “This week, top leaders of Africa and Europe gathered in Angola in an attempt to answer this question: Can ethical business practices win out in the global race to extract Africa’s vast mineral resources? The moral tone for the summit was set last month by European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen. In a speech, she said Europe seeks critical materials for its China-challenged industries but ‘not just for Europe’s needs – but with local processing and added value [in Africa].’ In other words, can European mining companies help Africa process its raw minerals into consumer and industrial goods while also boosting local jobs and local skills? For some countries in Europe, that would mean a shift away from how it often treats former colonies. As President Faustin-Archange Touadéra of the Central African Republic put it in September, ‘The era of Africa’s dependence is over.'” (11/24/25)

    https://www.csmonitor.com/Commentary/the-monitors-view/2025/1124/Extracting-minerals-in-Africa-for-Africa

  • The Censorship Industrial Complex’s Power Grip in Germany

    Source: Racket News
    by Greg Collard

    “Many organizations and federal agencies involved in censoring Americans under the guise of mis/disinformation have shut down in the last couple years. Racket’s Twitter Files exposed the level of censorship slime oozing from organizations such as the Stanford Internet Observatory, the Election Integrity Project, and the Virality Project. On the government side of things, there was the Global Engagement Center, the Foreign Influence Task Force, and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), which still exists but is no longer involved in mis/disnfo work. That’s not to say America is perfect when it comes to free speech, but as Sen. Rand Paul said in September, ‘throughout government, the censorship apparatus that Biden had put in place is gone.’ However, if you look to Germany, the strongest economic power in the European Union, it’s easy to see where America was going.” (11/24/25)

    https://www.racket.news/p/the-censorship-industrial-complexs

  • The Fed Doesn’t Determine the Price of Credit. Markets Do

    Source: The Daily Economy
    by Alexander W Salter

    “Recent movements in short-term loan markets are a timely reminder of a forgotten truth: The Federal Reserve is not the master of credit conditions. It can influence interest rates, but it cannot dictate them. Interest rates ultimately reflect supply and demand conditions in the broader financial system. When those conditions shift, the Fed’s administered rates give way to market realities. That’s precisely what we’re seeing in the repo market now.” (11/24/25)

    https://thedailyeconomy.org/article/the-fed-doesnt-determine-the-price-of-credit-markets-do/

  • The Hot Tub of Death?: Bill Gates, Hurricane Melissa, and a Civilization Under Threat

    Source: TomDispatch
    by Juan Cole

    “In late October, Hurricane Melissa (that should have been called ‘Godzilla’) battered western Jamaica with 185-mile-an-hour winds. It tossed the roofs of buildings about like splintering javelins, demolished municipal buildings and hospitals, snapped telephone poles like matchsticks, flattened crops, and dumped torrential floodwaters everywhere, leaving $8 billion in damage. That Category 5 storm’s unprecedented ferocity was driven by an overheated Caribbean Sea, produced by 275 years of industrial civilization that has spewed obscene amounts of heat-trapping carbon dioxide into the atmosphere annually. The same week that U.N. officials spoke of an ‘apocalypse’ in Jamaica, American billionaire Bill Gates expressed a certain unease about officials and scientists concerned with climate change who, he thought, were being hysterical.” (11/24/25)

    https://tomdispatch.com/the-hot-tub-of-death/

  • The Real Fight Over Geoengineering Is Beginning

    Source: The Atlantic
    by Alexander C Kaufman

    “For years, the idea of geoengineering — artificially lowering global temperatures through technological means — has been met with skepticism. Only a handful of dedicated and much-criticized scientists have argued for researching it at all, and when others weighed in, it was generally to trash the idea. This September, in a study published in the journal Frontiers in Science, more than 40 experts in climate change, polar geosciences, and ocean patterns warned that geoengineering was extremely unlikely to work and likely to have dangerous consequences. … As the actual predictions for Earth’s future have become more dire, scientists are starting to agree. More than 120 of them signed on to a response to the Frontiers paper that argued that more research into geoengineering was, in fact, ‘urgently needed.'” (11/24/25)

    https://archive.is/IYgEB

  • Weaponised Lawfare as Domestic and International Threat to Western Democracies

    Source: Brownstone Institute
    by Ramesh Thakur

    “Lawfare, when weaponised, can pose a double threat to democracies. Domestically, the rule of law is an integral component of the theory of liberal democracy, and it underpins the institutions and practices of democratic governance. The expansion of the role of the state in regulating an increasing range of individuals’ and private entities’ behaviour has led to a proliferation of lawfare that can frustrate the ability of governments to govern and, in turn, lessen their legitimacy. In its international dimension, the rule of law should tame the exercise of power by states and mediate relations between the strong and the weak and the rich and the poor. However, illiberal states have no scope for activists using law to rein in their excesses, and no effective checks can be exercised on the strong behaving badly.” (11/24/25)

    https://brownstone.org/articles/weaponised-lawfare-as-domestic-and-international-threat-to-western-democracies/

  • It Should Be Illegal To Use AI To Deceive People

    Source: Caitlin Johnstone, Rogue Journalist
    by Caitlin Johnstone

    “It should be against the law to use generative AI to deceive the public. I’ve got absolutely no problem with outright government censorship in this case, and I say this as an aggressive and outspoken proponent of free speech. AI products which deceive people should be illegal in the same way fraud is illegal. I want it to be illegal to knowingly circulate AI video footage and pass it off as real. I want AI companies to be severely penalized if they don’t prevent people from using their products to generate fake videos that get passed off as real.” [editor’s note: When you say you have “no problem with government censorship” in ANY case, you are by definition not “an aggressive and outspoken proponent of free speech” – TLK (11/24/25)

    https://caitlinjohnstone.com.au/2025/11/24/it-should-be-illegal-to-use-ai-to-deceive-people/

  • Enchanted by Socialism

    Source: Underthrow
    by Max Borders

    “The Fabian Society was founded in 1884 in London as a socialist organization committed to gradual change rather than violent revolution. It has served as the primary think tank of Britain’s Labour Party, which means it’s steeped in so-called democratic socialism. Their original logo is a wolf in sheep’s clothing. The Fabian Society took its name from Roman general Quintus Fabius Maximus, known for wearing down enemies through patient, deliberate tactics rather than direct attacks. The name is meant to reflect the society’s commitment to gradualism. No violence. No gulags. No famines. Just slow ‘permeation.’ But a wolf is still a wolf. And socialism is still a predatory project.” (11/24/25)

    https://underthrow.substack.com/p/enchanted-by-socialism